Fred was orphaned when he was only about four years old. He and his half brother Clifford and half sister Lee went to live with their maternal grandparents after their mother died of "milk sickness" in Calderwood, TN. His mother and stepfather John Birchfield had divorced before he was born. His biological father was a Price who came from Lehigh, Pennsylvania to work on the Tapoco Dam project. Price's parents, Lewis and Ellen Jones Price, had immigrated to the USA from Denbigshire, Wales in the early 1850's.

After awhile, Fred lived with other relatives and friends, mostly his mother's half sister Tennessee May Nichols Davis and her husband James "Daddy Jim" Davis. He developed a great love for hunting and fishing and roaming the woods. He had a hard life and many adventures which he wrote about in a manuscript in his later years.

Fred was one of the teenage hobos during the Depression, riding the rails across the US in search of work. He met Violet Slagle when he was working in a lumber camp at Proctor, Swain County, NC, when he was thirty years old and they eloped (she was only seventeen). They moved to Fontana where the dam was being constructed and he worked there for a year before they moved to Blount County, TN where Fred had grown up. By that time they had a daughter, Frances, and three more children were born to them during the ten years they lived in TN: Ina May, David Edward, and Priscilla Marie.

While he was working at a sawmill in Townsend, TN, a log rolled over on Fred and cause severe back injury from which he never fully recovered.

They moved back to Fontana and Fred worked on the GSI maintenance crew at Fontana Village during the 50's and 60's.He was a jack-of-all-trades and took on what ever work was available. He and Violet moved their family several times during those years--first to Sweetwater, then to several locations in the Tuskeegee Community, then to the Robbinsville area. When he developed Alzhiemers during his seventies, he moved to McCracken Rest Home in Haywood County near his daughter Frances.

One day in the 1940's, while he was plowing with a mule, Fred felt the Lord calling him to preach. Soon he was ordained as a Missionary Baptist preacher and spent the rest of his life teaching the Bible, preaching, holding revivals, singing, and ministering in many ways to his fellow man. He loved the Lord and he loved his fellow man. Though he had no material wealth to share, he spent his life in service to others. He especially enjoyed attending church and singing with his Native Cherokee friends from Snowbird.